Why stabilisation in golf practice does not mean repeating the same task unchanged, but recognising when repetition helps, when a new challenge makes sense and when we need to simplify again.
During one of our recent five-day course weeks, something became very clear that is easy to misunderstand in golf practice:
Stabilisation rarely follows a straight line.
A golfer finds a functional solution, repeats it and becomes more confident. Then we change the task. A different lie, another club, a bigger movement or a more demanding situation can show how reliably the skill is already available.
If quality drops, that does not automatically mean the previous work failed. It can simply mean that the new demand is still too great at that moment.
In that case, the right next step may be to simplify the task again.
Simplify first, then build
During this course week, we worked among other things on strike quality, ground contact and the organisation of the movement.
At the beginning, it made sense to keep individual tasks deliberately simpler. Shorter shots, smaller movements and clearer conditions helped the golfer first find a functional solution and better recognise what had changed when an attempt worked well.
Once that solution became more reliable, repetition followed.
Not because repetition is always the best form of practice. At that moment, it gave the golfer the opportunity to coordinate movement, strike and feedback more effectively.
Only after that did we increase the demands.
For example, we switched between fairway and semi-rough, changed ball lies, worked with a pitching wedge and a 7-iron and moved from smaller movements to fuller shots.
The technical theme sometimes remained similar. The task for the golfer, however, was no longer the same.
Making a task harder is not the goal in itself
A common mistake would be to make every successful task immediately more difficult.
That is not what we are trying to do.
We change a task when the current solution appears stable enough to cope meaningfully with a new demand.
Sometimes that next step works surprisingly well. Sometimes it quickly shows where uncertainty still exists.
We then observe: does the strike remain reliable enough? Can the golfer still organise the movement? Can they recognise differences between attempts? Or does the additional difficulty cause the actual learning goal to become increasingly lost?
The golfer’s response helps us decide what the next practice step should look like.
A change in the task does not only tell us whether a shot works. It gives us information about how stable and adaptable the previously developed solution already is.
Why a visible technical change alone does not yet mean that a skill has really been learned is explained in more detail in the Golf Learning Insight When is a technical change in golf really learned?
In the video, the golfer plays a shot from semi-rough on a slightly uphill lie. The situation is deliberately more demanding than a neutral lie on the driving range: ground conditions, grass, slope and strike all need to be taken into account at the same time.
On closer inspection, slight grass contact can be seen before the actual ball contact. For the coach, that is useful information. It suggests that strike quality may not yet be fully stable from this lie and that control of the angle of attack under changed conditions should continue to be observed.
At the same time, other elements already show functional adaptations. The way the legs work against the slope and the organisation of the movement suggest that the golfer recognises the characteristics of the lie and is trying to adapt the shot accordingly.
This is where stabilisation in golf practice becomes interesting: it is not enough to perform a movement under one single condition. We want to find out whether the golfer can increasingly control strike and angle of attack across different lies as well.
The key question is therefore not only: Did this shot work? It is also: Does the solution remain available across repeated attempts and under changed conditions?
If it becomes clear that strike quality or control of the angle of attack still varies too much, the next useful step may become simpler again, for example through more targeted tasks on the driving range or further controlled situations on the golf course.
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Sometimes stabilisation leads back through a simpler task
That is exactly what happened during this week as well.
After we had already worked with different lies, clubs and larger movements, the strike showed that some additional information was still needed.
Why we do not automatically continue repeating in situations like this, but sometimes first add information or simplify the task, is also described in the Golf Learning Insight When does a golfer need more practice – and when more information?
At that moment, continuing to practise the more difficult task would not necessarily have solved the actual problem.
We therefore went back to pitches of around 30 metres. The movement became smaller and the task more manageable. This allowed the golfer to focus more closely again on ball contact, ground contact and the connection between the individual movement elements.
From the outside, that could look like a step backwards.
For the learning process, it was the opposite. The simplified task created the conditions in which the new information could be processed and tested meaningfully.
We describe the specific work on strike and ground contact in more detail in our Golf Learning Insight on improving strike quality in chipping and pitching. This article, by contrast, focuses on how we manage difficulty during the learning process.
Repetition and variation serve different purposes
That is why we try not to treat repetition and variation as opposites.
Repetition can help organise a solution more effectively and make it more reliably available. Variation can then show whether that solution still works when conditions change.
Both can be valuable. The timing is what matters.
A golfer who is only just beginning to understand a new movement may first need several similar attempts. At another stage, a different lie, another club or a bigger movement may provide exactly the information we need for the next learning step.
And the same golfer can move between these two situations several times within a single course week.
This combination of targeted repetition, adjusted difficulty, variation and renewed stabilisation is an important part of our Practice Lab.
That is why stabilisation is not a straight path
The development during this course week cannot be described as a simple line.
Simplify → find a functional solution → repeat → increase difficulty → observe → adapt → simplify again if necessary → stabilise again → increase the challenge later.
This is an important part of good coaching.
Not offering as many exercises as possible. Not introducing variation as quickly as possible. And not repeating the same task until every ball looks the same.
Instead, we observe what the golfer is showing at that moment and use that information to decide the next useful learning step.
Sometimes that means more repetition. Sometimes a new demand. Sometimes another lie or a different club. And sometimes it means making the task smaller again so that new information can actually be processed meaningfully.
In our Golf Learning System, we therefore do not understand stabilisation as rigidly repeating a solution once it has been found. The goal is to make skills increasingly reliable and adaptable so that they remain available later under changing conditions on the golf course.
Monnard Widmer Coaching Insight
Stabilisation does not mean keeping a task exactly the same. It also means recognising when a golfer is ready for a new challenge and when a simpler task is the better next step.
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